 Thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon for developing a data-driven approach to organizational development if you're looking for another topic You might be in the wrong room. I hope everybody takes a moment to stretch themselves out in their seats as we get started Since it is the afternoon And we're here to talk to you about a topic that Jackie and I care a great deal about So we'll get started Jackie Lorraine oversees Washington University Libraries administrative functions including HR, organizational learning, finance, assessment, building operations and communications And she also teaches organizational behavior and development to MBA students at the Maryville University Simon School of Business Jackie brings over two decades of organizational leadership experience in higher ed, state government and the nonprofit sector And I'm Christine Curian. I'm skill types chief operating officer and I lead product and customer success And I bring to that more than two decades of academic library experience I was formerly the AUL for data and operations in the Boston University Libraries where I was responsible for talent And I worked in the MIT Libraries for more than 20 years leading departments responsible for innovative projects and advancing organizational effectiveness Everything from digitization to software development and UX So what we have for you today is beginning with an overview of the talent ecosystem for libraries. It's complicated, exciting and interesting And we will also talk about ways in which tools like the skill type platform can help in this ecosystem to make skills data visible Jackie will provide an overview of examples of approaches taken by a real library, Washington University and St. Louis To take on data driven approaches to developing skills and making the best of their organization We have allocated time for questions at the end. Please use the microphone for your questions And we are here because the challenges facing libraries are so vast And they can be lessened with timely actionable data that treats the library's most precious collection It's people with the respect and care and rigor it deserves So here we go. So the digital skills landscape is one that's always changing So the shelf life of skills in 2017 was estimated to be about five years In the recent years it's far less than three years and I'm not sure any of us in this room a year ago might have heard of large language models or chat GPT The HR talent data that we have to work with is often fragmented and complete or stale, trapped across spreadsheets, file stores and memories High immune retention are highly competitive right now and the top people that are working in library organizations are there because they choose to be All the stakeholders within the ecosystem expect more of one another Whether that's a library leader who's trying to respond to a provost's request to advance data science on their campus With a flat head count or a few additional resources or the staff and managers who are seeking ways to grow There's hope on the horizon in terms of certificates, micro credentials, fellowships and practice based opportunities that can bring needed expertise and diversity to the industry And also continue to advance the learning after someone earns an MLIS or for those who've never had the opportunity to do so due to cost lack of access Strategic plans are highlighting skill development to realize vision and values and to deliver world class experiences and library leadership roles focused on people development are growing as well In a time when collections general collections are increasingly shared at scale skills and expertise in the people in a library can be a key differentiator that distinguishes a library between other partners on campus or other libraries down the street So within this complex landscape having access and information about the capabilities of people to calibrate planning can really provide a lot of flexibility for leaders and responsiveness to change This is an area where skill type as a platform can help So some of you may be familiar with skill type from prior CNI briefings by Tony Zanders for example who was here in 2021 talking about the global skills library economy If you're not familiar skill types platform was founded in 2018 and is a growing global community with more than 130 organizations and more than 3000 users that includes academic libraries, public libraries, high schools and consortia It's powered by library specific control vocabulary and data model that standardizes skills, job roles, products that are used in libraries, organizations, associations and vendors And links those to curated trading content as well as actionable current insights for leaders to plan for managers to manage and bring out the best in their staff and for individuals to take an active role in growing their own careers When we're talking about data informed organizational development, it's drawing on a long history of libraries curating their collections with care, rigor and discipline and analysis and applying that to the capabilities of the people in the library It's not a passive thing that administration is responsible for everyone in this data informed ecosystem, including individual staff have access to data about their own skills about the kinds of jobs that their skills may link to that may be within their current work or related work that they never thought of before within the information professions Team managers are able to align a group skills with the priorities and values of the organization and they can have authentic conversations based on people's interests and prior experience about the work that they might be ready to do This can make equitable access to professional development and training more possible and opportunities for growth more accessible for the people that may have been left out in the past And for leaders having a standardized dashboard of talent needs to understand how to allocate vacancies when positions are empty and how to adapt current roles to needs is a key component in being able to evolve the library forward When it's time for recruitment, there's a suite of options that involve developing staff internally finding people who may be ready to step up or have articulated an interest in a particular area and external recruitment that complements the skills that already exist in the library And this is some of what Jackie Lorraine and the team at Washington University Libraries in St. Louis are doing So now we'll hear a case study about how data informed organizational development works in practice Thanks Jackie Hello and thank you all again for being here I will share some of the work with you that we're doing at Washington University Libraries and afterwards I look forward to answering as many of your questions as I can and hopefully also learning more from you A little background about the libraries at Wash U. We have a total of nine locations and we have an operating budget of about $32 million Our organizational structure and leadership consists of the Office of the Vice Provost and University Library which is led by Mimi Coulter And our Chief of Staff who oversees our administrative support, donor engagement and grants program We have five distinct and integrated divisions which include digital scholarship and technology services, research and academic collaboration services, collection management and access services, special collections And the division which I oversee planning operations and administrative services Our staffing profile consists of approximately 140 FTEs, 60% of those positions are professional positions and 40% are non-exempt or paraprofessional roles We have approximately 80 student employees and this staffing profile has shifted significantly over the years And specifically related to student positions, we've had almost 200 positions when I first joined the libraries nine years ago and we're moving toward more strategic and specialized roles And I'll share more about how that has changed and why that has changed as we go on in the presentation On the screen you'll see our mission, organizational principles and our strategic priorities that drive our current organizational development activities and those we've been involved in over the past five or six years The mission and principles were established under a previous leader, we continue to evolve by prioritizing career, team and organizational development activities with our strategic priorities including collaboration, collections and infrastructure And these are also aligned with the university pillars of academic distinction, DEI and a research focus Some of our data-driven organizational development activities have included state interviews, which are 101 meetings to get feedback about the individual and their role in the organization It has helped us to understand individual career and professional goals, provide leaders with data to identify growth opportunities and staff to lead projects and initiatives It also keeps staff engaged and helps us to increase staff retention. Can everyone hear me okay? Our professional development and performance management focus has been driven to help to drive organizational effectiveness and excellence Our professional development is built into job expectations and job descriptions for each role Despite budget cuts, we've continued to invest in professional development, support for our staff at all levels of the organization We've established managerial competencies such as communication, leadership and planning, as well as staff values which include balance, collaboration and dedication Which are written into our performance expectations to ensure everyone is focused on personal, organizational goals and priorities as well as leadership development We have conducted a workforce analysis which was a holistic approach to identifying strategic positions needed to help our organization meet evolving needs Through that process, we identified internal candidates and redefined roles to meet those needs and address critical demands We also appropriately defined student level work Our student workers, this study that we did with our student worker program resulted in approximately $200,000 that was redistributed in our conversation budget to toward more strategic positions or to help establish new FTEs for essential services Our staff retention efforts have been a collaboration between the university and the libraries to increase salaries to appropriate market levels Especially for positions with specialized skills and are hard to fill We have also promoted people and upgraded positions to appropriate grade levels based on the current work and activities that they're doing and organizational demands Participating in multi-year planning projects with our overall budget structure and staffing This includes forecasting long-term staffing and budgetary requirements to meet research, teaching and technology and digital transformation needs As part of our annual budget process, we identify priority roles, request new headcounts and look for opportunities to repurpose positions if possible when vacancies occur We've also shifted our recruitment practices to focus on skills and experience rather than types of degrees and degree levels for certain positions We've rewritten job descriptions with a broader scope to attract more diverse applicant pools and creating greater access for job seekers with critical needs that we need in our organization We've partnered with staffing agencies and organizations like LaunchCo, which is a nonprofit that helps people enter into the technology field Through this work, we've identified staff from non-traditional backgrounds to field developer and system engineer roles and created a more diverse staffing profile within our technology services department We've continued the work of re-aligning departments and workflows to increase organizational effectiveness Each AUL engages in regular assessments with our divisions to understand challenges and opportunities And most of those assessments have resulted in redistribution of work, redesigned or newly formed departments and positions We've also developed business process improvement projects which has engaged different departments throughout the organization to examine our internal business practices to minimize silos and streamline our business operations We also have created an internal expertise survey which was geared towards supporting life cycles of faculty research and teaching And this was initiated to address the research needs identified by our stakeholders via campus-wide survey from our previous strategic plan And our goals with this survey were to identify expert roles and staff levels of expertise, develop a mechanism for users to identify appropriate experts in our organization and provide a template for library staff to develop expertise This project was perfectly aligned with skill type and we used the platform to meet our initial lead of establishing a talent management process The skill type was implemented as a catalyst for building sufficient organizational capacity and creating a learning organization And part of the process was establishing guidelines for managers to make the most of skill types use Skill type is currently fully integrated into our 101 onboarding process and it is highlighted in our library's 101 program which we established to introduce staff to the full scope of our organizational operation and the library's role within the university So that staff who are not familiar with the academic library community can feel informed, included and engaged Skill type is also aligned with our commitment to create opportunities for continuous staff development and we use skill type and the use of skill type has been incorporated into our professional development policy This work has resulted in a pilot project with Amigos where our skill type data is being used to identify broader training needs and develop future programming Looking ahead, some of the projects that we are working on related to our strategic priorities and the university's strategic plan includes our digital infrastructure and digital infrastructure strategy and our digital library roadmap which was established and led by my colleague Harriet Green This is a multi-year strategy to expand technology infrastructure, implement new digital tools and expand services for data-driven research And it's also tied to the university's goal to leverage digital solutions to advance studies in areas such as AI and social sciences We've recently established our idea statement which is inclusion, diversity, equity and access And our next steps is creating goals and objectives for advocacy, collections, spaces and inclusive organizational culture Another initiative related to idea is continuing developing new internships to expose students of color and graduates of the university's prison education program to our organization and library science profession We're continuing to increase staff capacity in areas such as instruction, metadata and digital preservation And we've recently recruited a new assessment role that is focused on data analytics and data visualization And we're currently using other assessment tools like the ARL project outcomes, ACRL benchmark, ARL research and assessment cycle toolkit, university initiated surveys to identify opportunities to enhance our services and improve our overall impact We're continuing to work with the skill type platform to bridge gaps to customize opportunities and training Through increased usage and updates to profiles, we are hoping to provide greater insight into our organizational skill capacity We are having a renewed focus on individual interests and team management so that managers have the ability to assess needs and identify training opportunities And we are also exploring new use cases with our student advisory group, donors and internal committees to try to identify user needs and expertise alignment Back over to you, Christine Well thanks Jackie for that great update from Washington University and St. Louis I think that one of the important pieces of this is that the work of developing a healthy organization, it's alive and it continues to grow So you can't quite just check it off as being done And Washington University Libraries have made a lot of progress So we're now at the point of Q&A, so we have a few questions to leave with the group We also are happy to take your questions, but I think overall, how might we advance knowledge in our communities through data driven organizational development? What types of expertise differentiate your organization or do you like your organization to be known for? And what are some of the ways that you could start modeling skills and capacity today? So we are happy to take your questions or your responses to these prompts We're really grateful to be here and you can also reach out to us after this too So thank you for your listening and your patience. Please bring us your questions at the microphone Thank you for your talk. I'm Jamie Wittenberg from CU Boulder Libraries I'm curious about the response that you've had among your staff implementing these data driven organizational development strategies I'm particularly interested whether there's been a negative response related to professional development and skills training or information being shared with third parties or that data being monetized in some way by third parties and I'm curious what your licenses look like when you negotiate terms with those organizations Do you want to take the first part about adoption Jackie and then I can talk about privacy and how we protect people's data? Sure, yes. We've had an open process to our professional development The implementation of skill type and other professional development opportunities We've had buy-in from our middle managers and our leadership team before we rolled it out to all staff We make sure that everyone is informed about any changes that we're making And so we've had a pretty open process for that and so I think that's helped with our communication I think there's more work that we can do to make sure that people understand what's involved What's out there in the skill type platform and how it can meet their individual needs and how we can better utilize it But we've been pretty open to staff with their ideas if they find a training or workshop that they want to go to We've identified funds to try to make sure that everyone has the type of professional development opportunities that they need Thanks Jackie Skill type works with a variety of libraries and so we have adoption rates that range from 50% to I think Jackie had mentioned 85% for the staff And a lot of that tone is set by the leaders in the organization and how they set up skill type and the kind of value it can deliver So making professional development available to all members of the staff, people who may not be able to travel, etc It can be an equalizer and it can also be one to I've worked in libraries where people didn't know what they needed to do to be successful So creating some of that information where it's clear what's expected and how people can grow is a component of setting up skill type Or other tools for adoption I've also worked on a lot of IT projects and I'm sure people in this room have done ILS migrations and so on And people have a healthy level of skepticism whenever they're asked to go through anything that's new or changed The other component to your question and thank you for asking it about how data access is controlled and so on Is something that we're actually very proud of and we've worked really hard on So individuals that are invited to join skill type with your library, the data stays with your library And so individuals are able to see who in the organization can access their data And if they want to connect to other organizations that aren't your library, they do that through opting in The skill type data set isn't shared with any additional third parties And so all of this information is transparent and if you're a skill type user or you've seen the platform from the three dots menu on the upper right There's a privacy check and folks can see what roles in their library are able to see data about them My skills data for example, Tony who's in the back row is my boss and so he can see the trainings that The type of trainings I've done from our control vocabulary and the topics and he can see that I watched 60 videos in the last 180 days But he doesn't know when I did it and he's not able to download any information about what those trainings are at what time As an individual I can do that myself and then I have a record of something that I can send to Tony or a peer Like hey these were all the trainings or things that I've learned in the past six months That can save me some time in my performance review but I have control over that data and so my team manager In the way that we set up the platform and I don't want to get into too much detail about it but I'm happy to talk to you about it later We have controls in place so that the right people have access to the data and that's up to the library when they work with us to set it up We've worked pretty hard I think on our privacy policy we're open to feedback about it But all of it is transparent all of those policies are transparent and visible to the people But you've pointed out a really important part of adoption so thanks for asking your question Thanks very much And when we implemented skill type we did have our university attorneys look at the policy and they looked at all the information to make sure that it was in line with the university practices So we did go the extra mile to make sure that everything was protected and in line with that More questions? Can you hear me? Want to try again? What my last statement is in general the university's guidelines Yeah we did have the university's office of general counsel look at our contracts and agreements with skill type before we implemented it I'm curious if you have any data on what has happened since you've done this in terms of retention Have less people left? Have more people been promoted? Are people going places for different reasons? What kind of assessment have you done? Well we have ongoing assessment in that space But after the pandemic we've had a record number of recruitment so one fourth of our staff is fairly new So it's hard to gauge retention when you have so many new people We've had some turnover in the last year but it's been minimal in comparison to previous years Where we've had a lot of retirements and things like that We've had lots of internal promotions and we're doing more of that Whether it's been redefining their roles or when we've had a position that has opened and we've recruited internally And some of those have been appointments and some of those have been where they've had to compete in a national search So I don't have specific numbers but I know that overall we've been more intentional about internal promotions And ensuring that people have other opportunities for advancement within our organization Does that answer your question? Alright thank you so much for your presentation I'm curious if you can talk a bit about the data that you're collecting on expertise And is that self-identified by people in your library? Is there some kind of assessment that you're doing to see like is this person truly an expert in X thing and how you're tracking that? So the initial survey that we did before we implemented skill type was to identify levels of expertise Is this person a novice? Do they know how to do advanced? Do they have advanced skills in particular areas? And that was the initial concept that we implemented with that survey But that work is still being done so we don't have any specific data about or any internal tests about people's level of assessment We have done skills testing with people that we have recruited externally for certain positions And we have done skills assessments to ensure that they have the necessary things that we need them to do So we have done that in the recruitment process But we have not done a broader range of assessment about internal skills within our organization at this point And speaking from libraries that we work with on the skill type platform We get this question a lot about what does it really mean to have a skill or an expertise And so this is a situation where within the platform we've implemented professional competency standards From a variety of organizations, ALA, ACRL and more And those standards for competency are themselves a little dusty at times And who judges a person's level of competency or their ability to do their job is highly subjective And so the software doesn't grade or judge people but it starts by asking the question What are you good at? What do you do every day in your job? And with some of the customers we work with that may be the first time that the staff have ever been asked that question And so we start by allowing people to self-identify the skills that they have And then that can power the ongoing management and conversations that people have about strengths and weaknesses and areas for folks to grow But it's something that people ask about a lot and they think that we might want to... It might be too small of a question about what does it mean to be a librarian now What are the skills that are needed? How do we bring those out in people and develop them? So I'm really glad that you asked the question but I think that there's a lot more to it than we can get into in the remainder of the session So I'm going to ask a question even though I think you probably just touched upon on the response I was going to ask about sort of what types of credentialing really exists within the program And how are you assessing that the person actually achieves the skills that they're trying to learn in order to advance either in the organization or elsewhere? I think that would tie in to the existing workflows in the organization about how skills are evaluated and judged I think this will be something that will always be judged by the people that are closest to the situation And there are some software for learning management for example that implement a standard of competency But whether that standard is relevant to the situation that a particular library is in at a given time remains to be seen So I think there's work that could be done with this and there are types of certificates that are coming out of information school programs that could also be followed too Thanks for the question Hi, I'm Karen Esslin. She heard from Colorado State University Thank you for your presentation and I'm going to pop up a little bit on what Trevor was talking about by asking specifically about the manager competencies Because as you mentioned the data driven development in my organization manager competencies is the top issue we believe We have lots of sending them to a traditional HR training has not worked So I'm just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what are those manager competencies and how have you integrated that into your organizational development process, Jackie? I named a few of them. When we implemented it, we established the competencies and then we gave specific examples We created a grid with specific examples of what that would look like organizational planning in each quarter each time we do a performance management Go through our performance management process on the self evaluation the managers have to include how have they met this particular objective or competency or goal And those are built into that specific performance management form for managers So we have one specifically for managers and those are managerial competencies, but also our staff values are built into that And then we have one that is that is just organizational competencies or things you need to be successful in our organization And that's done separately but planning communication leadership, I don't know the mobile I'm sorry, but specific examples, like I said, agree that this is what leadership looks like This is what effective communication looks like, you know, meeting with your staff or making sure that you said performance expectations And, you know, having balance and making sure there's equitable work within your department. So, so that they have a clear understanding of what we mean by leadership And then if we feel that someone isn't meeting that expectation and then we identify, you know, training, whether it's internally, you know, through our shoe or another organization to help the person development And then ongoing coaching, so I would say across the platform some of the data modeling we're starting to do with what are the competencies related to management are also touching on things such as intercultural fluency And then we have a set of collaboration managing projects or services or using data to understand how an organization in a library works that perspective of assessment and understanding the impact of what's going on is starting to bubble up in terms of the And the skills that are being identified by both library organizations on our platform and individual library professionals too So we hope to do more of that modeling over over time, but I would hypothesize that what a manager needs to do today is probably a lot different than five years ago, particularly if you're dealing with hybrid or remote staff or other kinds of situations around really distributing work equitably So there's lots more to be done there, but managers are such a key component of being able to realize priorities and sometimes they don't get very much attention and kind of live in that middle where everybody wants something from them So they can at least have some current tools and training and support in an environment like WashU to be able to do more I think we are at time. Please reach out to us if you have any further questions. We really enjoyed being here today and go out and we hope that you'll be able to think about the capacity and people in your library a little differently as a result of today. Bye-bye